Every year, I try to get into a new style that pushes my appreciation of extreme music just a little bit further. In 2017, I took a deeper dive into grindcore with some classic Napalm Death and Agoraphobic Nosebleed. This past year, I attempted to grasp the appeal of the super-dissonant side of death metal. Portal are probably the best known band in this style right now and are still well beyond me, but I think I’m more invested at wrapping my head around Gorguts at this juncture, as their melodic sensibilities are more pronounced and I’ve been a Colin Marston fan ever since I first heard “You Will Be Reincarnated As An Imperial Attack Space Turtle”.

That said, after 2018, I think Anachronism might have been the band I was looking for this whole year. After hearing the first couple tracks of Orogeny, which I believe to be their second album, I was pretty sure Anachronism would be a great gateway into the thick, murky, dissonant ends of the death metal spectrum. Orogeny ended up exceeding my expectations on every front and was one of the strongest albums I heard this year. (Also before the cut I need to tell you that this album shares a name with the magic system in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, which you absolutely must read if you’re up for some heavy-hitting fiction.)

Anachronism aren’t what I would call accessible, let’s be clear; I wouldn’t recommend this to you if you’re trying to get into metal in general. What I think any listener would recognize, though, is that this album grooves. This album feels alive. The rhythm section does their best to keep you on your toes with frequent tempo changes and wild drum patterns (which will seem almost Dillinger-esque to folks expecting a typical brutal death metal experience), but there’s a churning, tectonic pulse to each of these tracks that locks everything in, that keeps you bobbing your head even as you’re inundated by blast beats. Many bands would be content to put all their eggs into that basket and push the groove as high in the mix as they could (thus drowning out the treble and turning Orogeny into another caverncore record), but Raphaël Bovey, who mixed this album, clearly knew what he was doing, and knew that that approach would be a disservice to these songs. The mix instead honors the incredible technical capacity of these musicians and the songwriting chops of band mastermind/vocalist/guitarist Lisa Voisard; the solos on this album are gorgeous and unexpected, slice upwards through the low end’s roil to unfold and astound. The title track is a great showcase of how Anachronism balance grace and brutality like true masters, but I don’t have a favorite track on this album; the whole thing rips. Except for the two tracks that don’t: “Hidden Relief” is a poetic interlude that brings to the stark forefront one of the album’s lyrical themes, the torturous process of self-actualization; and the outro, “11’034”, is a cold, granular electronic composition that conjures all the longing of Deathprod’s imaginary songs from tristan da cunha as Anachronism takes their leave, inviting us to reflect on what we have learned.

Anachronism are a diamond in the rough, an unsigned band from Switzerland who took me by storm in 2018 with an album both craggy and scintillating. They didn’t get a lot of press this year (though they did end up on Trevor Strnard’s list), and I can only hope that they get as much support from the industry at large as they want in 2019 and beyond; they’re a force to be reckoned with, and I can’t wait to see what comes next for them.

]]>Scriv’s Favorite Albums of 2018: Rivers of Nihil, Where Owls Know My Namehttp://bloodletterpress.com/scrivs-favorite-albums-of-2018-rivers-of-nihil-where-owls-know-my-name
Thu, 06 Dec 2018 15:39:16 +0000http://bloodletterpress.com/?p=1152Continue reading Scriv’s Favorite Albums of 2018: Rivers of Nihil, Where Owls Know My Name→]]>Alright, let’s say you’ve got an album by a band called Rivers of Nihil (spooky), and they’ve got a real spiky logo (at least it’s legible) and the album cover is a Dan Seagrave (he’s done all their album covers)–you, and most everybody else, will probably conclude that this is a metal album. But from the very first chord, if you’re even remotely familiar with the genre, you can further guess that Where Owls Know My Name isn’t going to be just another metal album (and if you’re not, you’ll come to the same realization around when the first saxophone solo kicks in). Even then, you still might not expect how beautifully written, how emotive, how powerful an experience it ends up being.

Prior to Owls, I’ve found Rivers of Nihil to be a thoroughly middle-of-the-road band. They’d written songs entrenched firmly in the idiom of modern progressive death metal, songs full of technical flare and cool structure that, to my ears, just didn’t have enough to set them apart from the dozens of other bands playing that style. It’s only by breaking the mold, by taking stylistic risks and allowing themselves to make exactly the record they wanted to make, that they’ve achieved a truly standout piece of work.

Swathed in the theme of autumn and tracing a loose concept about the last human being, granted immortality so as to bear witness to the death of the earth, Where Owls Know My Name is a work of melancholy. The heaviness here draws its force not from rage, but from regret, from the bottled-up anguish of isolation, from the craving to return to the way things were even as one acknowledges that the past was never as one remembers it. These themes make the inclusion of saxophone and Hammond organ, relic’s of prog’s yesteryear, all the more poignant, and all that more vital to this album’s presentation. Songs like “The Silent Life”, album centerpiece “Subtle Change”, and the title track are emotive masterworks, the howling of a Frankenstein’s monster born of old prog and new prog, aching to be loved once more by those who are long gone.

And Rivers of Nihil know how to crush it when they set out to crush it. Open-note stabs puncture blast beats on tracks like “Death Is Real” and “Old Nothing”, and the blackened middle section of “Subtle Change” caught me by surprise with a torrent of shrieks and tremolo riffs. This band hasn’t sacrificed one kilogram of their heaviness–they’re just writing songs that do it justice. Grooveable riffs and neck-snappers are the norm here.

I’ve been listening to this one approximately since it came out, and it’s only grown on me, and no doubt will continue to do so for years. Given that they’ve stated that they don’t want to be pidgeonholed as “the saxophone band”, I can only hope that Rivers of Nihil will continue to give themselves the freedom to experiment, for if they do, I’m sure that more albums of this caliber are in the cards for them. This is my metal album of 2018.

]]>Scriv’s Favorite Albums of 2018: Mitski, Be The Cowboyhttp://bloodletterpress.com/scrivs-favorite-albums-of-2018-mitski-be-the-cowboy
Tue, 23 Oct 2018 15:33:21 +0000http://bloodletterpress.com/?p=1140Continue reading Scriv’s Favorite Albums of 2018: Mitski, Be The Cowboy→]]>Buckle up: this is the one that almost got away from me, and it’s my favorite non-metal album of the year.

The songs my friends had played me off of Mitski’s previous album Puberty 2 were gauzy, moody tracks that I didn’t hear in the right context to let them really speak to me, so I probably wouldn’t have made time to listen to Be The Cowboy had my housemate not popped it on in the car in late August while we were moving. Perhaps if I’d seen Mitski supporting Lorde and Run The Jewels when they came through Boston earlier this year, I would have seen Be The Cowboy coming, but as it happened, I was absolutely floored. In its emotional range, its fearlessly unconventional song structures, and its pinpoint-precise instrumental choices, Be The Cowboy is a masterpiece and put Mitski on the map for me in a big way.

On this album, Mitski is a forlorn piano-vocal jazz singer, a pissed-off punk with a weaponized synth, a desperate rock-balladeer, a dry-humored acoustic singer-songwriter, a chamber goth wallowing in atmosphere and melancholy, a confessional pop singer, and more, often more than one in a single track, all of these voices in unison, all of them facets of a single experience. This is the basest level on which Mitski’s craft is masterful, and it would be enough to make this a great album, but consider that there are only two songs on this fourteen-track album that crack the three-minute mark. Even with this panoply of voices to showcase, Mitski has crafted a perfectly airtight, all-killer-no-filler experience. Again, this would be more than enough to make a great album, but Mitski’s not content with creating a display piece or a technical showcase. Mitski’s not content with making the easy choices. Mitski presents Be The Cowboy not as a work of aloof, untouchable genius, but as a product of messy, heartache-laden process. She does this by treating scraps of studio sound, digital aberrations, and non-musical noise with just as much care, and just as keen of an artistic eye, as the songs themselves.

No track on the album showcases this better than opener “Geyser”, the first couple seconds of which are so dramatic and so effective that I’m going to treat them like a spoiler because you should just go listen to the track instead of reading about it: “Geyser” blasts into being, mixed so loud that it shocks you into dialing down the volume, but just as you do, Mitski ripostes and dials down the volume herself, forcing you to turn the track back up just in time to meet with a screeching second of audio tearing in the middle of a line. Who does that?! This is psychological warfare of the kind that every edgy metal band aspires to but never reaches (Car Bomb is the only exception that jumps to mind). In the subsequent two minutes, “Geyser” encapsulates everything I loved about the dark, emotive alternative rock and metal of the early ’00’s, heavy and driving and suddenly soaring into major key as the lyrics take a corresponding dive into desperation, all with a cathartic finish that lets you exhale the breath you didn’t know you were holding. Then, as though into a new room in a museum exhibit, pulsing bass ushers you into “Why Didn’t You Stop Me?”, where blaring guitars offset twee synths, which then combine when catalyzed by the horns section in a delightful bit of sonic alchemy in the track’s second half . Another noise moment lurks at the very end of “Old Friend”, which, like someone we used to trust, lures us close with its gentle demeanor but keeps us off-balance at all times. The noise that crescendos at the very end of the track is subtle, but does so much to fasten the track’s narrative of social control, of manufactured, artificial ease.

Speaking of manufactured ease, Mitski’s lyrics weave through weighty material on this album, speaking to struggles in and against interpersonal relationships, expectations to fall silent and submit to the systems of control that whittle away at us, isolation, our own conceptions of ourselves and others, and ultimately, the tension that comes from our need to impose our will on our environment or get swept away by time and weariness. Through it all, the album title commands us, and the psyche characterized in these fourteen tracks, to face these struggles with all the casual arrogance and lazy dominion of the mythical American cowboy. The spirit of the album itself tries, and tries, to reach this degree of smug detachment, and sometimes succeeds, only to find itself more bereft than ever of the comfort it so longs for. It’s a beautiful struggle to watch and partake in, and there’s something in it for anyone who feels pressure to thrive in the face of external and internal turmoil–and maybe just wants to dance it out.

]]>The D&D v3.5 Books I Can’t Bear To Part With (Years After Switching to 5e)http://bloodletterpress.com/the-dd-v3-5-books-i-cant-bear-to-part-with-years-after-switching-to-5e
Mon, 22 Oct 2018 18:07:22 +0000http://bloodletterpress.com/?p=1154Continue reading The D&D v3.5 Books I Can’t Bear To Part With (Years After Switching to 5e)→]]>There’s a degree of irony to the fact that the Old School Renaissance is producing some of the best and hottest artwork, modules, and GM resources in the tabletop roleplaying game industry right now–isn’t “old school” by definition staid and played out? As with all gaming communities, there’s a component of tabletop RPG culture that is grounded in nostalgia; the best OSR content is like a classic car that’s been retooled with all-new parts, parts that have emerged from thirty to forty years of deep thought, experimentation, and winnowing on the topic of game mechanics. The folks behind that movement might have grown up on AD&D or the white box, but me and mine, we grew up on version 3.0 or 3.5.

From my rose-colored vantage point, the years of 3.5 were the halcyon days of Dungeons and Dragons, the golden era before 4.0 came along and caused the Schism that led to the rise of Pathfinder and, eventually, the forging of 5.0, the system I use nearly exclusively today. Ask any twentysomething tabletop gamer to sing you the saga, and I’m sure they’ll be glad to oblige. From a critical perspective, it’s clear that 5.0 is the superior game: in comparison, 3.5 feels bloated, and deeply, needlessly granular, a daunting mountain of rules for any prospective new player (despite its superior indexing). My perspective and tastes have changed with the times, but there are still an armful of 3.5 splatbooks, a fraction of the backbreaking load that I once possessed, that I hold onto, that still hold value to me as a game master or that I simply can’t bear to turn into a few dollars of store credit. Here they are, and here’s why I love them:

Draconomicon: This one is purely for the art. I mean, occasionally I’ll run something with some dragons, but 80% of the rules in the Draconomicon were never of use to me, and that’s being generous. The art, though! Todd Lockwood’s dragons adorn so many pages of this visual feast. If it were for the endpaper alone, I’d keep this book, but the detailed illustrations of dragon identifiers, flight patterns, lairs, and musculoskeletal anatomy make this a must-keep. The planar dragons in the monster section have also sparked plenty of ideas for bespoke dragon taxonomies, and even the draconic deities and custom spells have gotten my gears turning. I mean, imagine a dragon that breathes not just fire, but fire elementals. That’s cool as heck.

Manual of the Planes: One interesting thing I’ve noticed about the kids I play D&D with is that they take the lore presented in the 5e core and splatbooks as orthodoxy: if I tell them they’re fighting an orc, they automatically assume that this orc is a fanatic for one of the orc gods, probably Gruumsh, and, if accompanied by other orcs, is part of a patriarchal war-band that seeks out a fortification and decorates it with the bodies of its victims as it secures a hold on the region, just like the Monster Manual says. Then they’re surprised when I tell them that Gruumsh doesn’t necessarily exist in this campaign world, and that orcs can have diverse motivations just like other people. When I was new to D&D, I ate up the Forgotten Realms-derived lore that comes in the books, just like the kids do, but I don’t think I ever ran a game where what the book told me about “The D&D Universe” was of any concern. That said, Manual of the Planes, which is just a big ol’ treatise of precisely this kind of D&D lore, is probably the 3.5 splatbook that I get the most use out of today–probably because, unlike most other lore-driven splats, it’s willing to play fast and loose with some of the most basic assumptions about the nature of reality in any given D&D setting. I never owned the Planar Handbook, the player-centric counterpart to the Manual, and I’m sure it would’ve landed in the sell-for-credit pile long ago if I had, but the Manual is such a treasure trove of world-building material, and is chock-full of minutiae to populate those worlds with. A chaotic evil wizard on a quest for penance in the land of the angels? Check. A big ol’ walking machine city that I’m sure influenced Mortal Engines and Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan series? Check. Weirdly muscley astral creatures that will slurp up your silver cord like so much spaghetti? Check. Crack open Manual of the Planes to a random page and I bet there’ll be something cool on it.

Heroes of Horror: I have a very clear memory of being thirteen or so and crashed out on a cheap mattress in the basement (we must have had guests or something), surrounded by Lego bricks and listening to Korn on a mix CD with the recently-released Heroes of Horror open in front of me and just letting that book soak into me in the way that young people do. Once again, I’m not sure I used any of the mechanics in this book in any of the games I ran, but the instructive text in Heroes of Horror is pure gold. Moreso than any other splat I owned, I think Heroes of Horror got me thinking about precisely how I DM, how to evoke specific emotions and reactions from my players, to transform the game from location and combat encounters into true theatre of the mind, to make it an art form rather than just a hobby. The Creepy Effects table, the essays on the use and purpose of alignment (and the concept of doing away with it), the section on running encounters in dreams, and the sections on prophecies and curses are all great stuff.

Tome of Magic: I think I got this one before I got the Epic Level Handbook, which I no longer own. I don’t open up Tome of Magic as often as I do the other books on this list, but it’s useful as a mental construct, as a reminder of the way it primed me for the revelation the ELH contained: Vancian magic is only one way to do magic in RPGs, and it’s kinda boring by comparison. Two out of the three classes featured in Tome of Magic use the fire-and-forget system that Jack Vance inspired, but there’s still enough aesthetic trapping going on there, and enough cool variation on the concept (truename reversals, a concept dating back to OD&D) to make those classes seem fresh to a young player like I was. But the binder was where it was at. Wielding sigils straight out of the Goetia, the binder’s magic was easily obtained, but as with all too-good-to-be-true deals, sharing your body with spirits from beyond the planes came with a bit of a cost. The binder went on to inspire 5e’s warlock class and felt like the most cutting-edge development I’d seen yet back in the 3.5 days. It got me thinking about other magic tropes that D&D just didn’t have that I thought were exciting: novice wizards summoning demons way past their ability to control them and paying for it, desperate casters using their life force as backup power when their magic reserves had run dry, stuff like that. And once I’d realized that I wanted rules for those tropes, the natural solution was to write them myself, and the rest is history.

]]>Album Review: Nine Inch Nails, Bad Witchhttp://bloodletterpress.com/album-review-nine-inch-nails-bad-witch
Tue, 16 Oct 2018 17:41:25 +0000http://bloodletterpress.com/?p=1138Continue reading Album Review: Nine Inch Nails, Bad Witch→]]>I’m probably past the point of providing an unbiased review of a Nine Inch Nails release. Over the years, I’ve immersed myself in Trent Reznor’s music to such a degree that I feel I can address his work in totality, with a scope encompassing the ongoing life cycle of Nine Inch Nails, and, to a degree, industrial music in general. Given that, I regret to report that Bad Witch is kind of a lackluster release, and presents a less-than-fulfilling conclusion to the trilogy of EPs that began with Not The Actual Events and continued with Add Violence.

Bad Witch strikes me as both an experimental effort and a return to old tools in its use of saxophone (which we last saw used, to great effect, on Hesitation Marks) and in its longer, texture-heavy instrumental pieces (which, while common in the greater NIN discography, have been absent since The Slip). “Play The Goddamned Part”, the former of the two instrumentals, is denser and more hostile than most of Ghosts I-IV, but its alienating qualities stem less from its portraiture of the unknown and unfamiliar, and more from artistic choices both unconvincing and jarring—I wasn’t able to immerse in the gloom and tension of “Play The Goddamned Part”, and spent more time grappling with questions like “What’s being said with these saxophone squeals and offbeat clattering samples? Why were these choices made?” As a curiosity, a musical display piece to ponder over, it succeeds, but it doesn’t do nearly as much for me emotionally or synestheticly as “I’m Not From This World”, which lurks and slithers deliciously through a benighted bayou of its own creation.

Of the tracks featuring Reznor’s voice, “God Beak Down The Door” feels the strongest; both Reznor’s voice and the saxophone provide a smooth, moody compliment to the bitter and relentless synth line. The first few minutes of “Over And Out” are a little canned and chirpy, and seemed like a less interesting version of “Satellite” off Hesitation Marks, but Reznor’s vocal scoop and warbley vibrato on this track lends his voice an aged, Bowie-esque crooning quality that soaks into the track and plays hauntingly off of his repeated refrain: “time is running out”. “Shit Mirror” is grooveable, and feels like a solid deep cut, but doesn’t innovate or stomp quite hard enough to be a great first track (especially compared to “Branches/Bones” or “Less Than”), and it flows so smoothly into “Ahead of Ourselves” that I thought they were a single long song for the first two or three listens, which wasn’t exactly welcome. “Ahead of Ourselves” is a few variations on a single fuzzy, tinny groove; I wasn’t compelled by what the rhythm section was doing, and the song neither trades dynamic range for texture and build like the instrumental pieces, nor sells Reznor’s breathless, distorted delivery.

There are cool moments on Bad Witch, but it doesn’t feel like a cohesive piece, and its songs generally don’t hold enough weight to buck cohesion and stand on their own. These faults read even worse when you consider Bad Witch in context, as the finale to Not The Actual Events and Add Violence. Together, those two EPs told a story of a crumbling sense of security and growing paranoia in a world hell-bent on self-destructive habits, and the corresponding collapse of resolve and well-being as the political becomes personal. On Bad Witch, “Shit Mirror”’s refrain “new world, new time, mutation feels alright” seems to promise a new way forward, but the dark urgency of its companion pieces doesn’t manifest, and Bad Witch itself fails to achieve sufficient mutation to feel vital.

]]>Authorial Intent, the Ethics of Structure, and the Punk Rock Ethoshttp://bloodletterpress.com/authorial-intent-the-ethics-of-structure-and-the-punk-rock-ethos
Thu, 04 Oct 2018 14:12:03 +0000http://bloodletterpress.com/?p=1077Continue reading Authorial Intent, the Ethics of Structure, and the Punk Rock Ethos→]]>In my senior year of college, I wrote, directed, and acted in an adaptation of Hamlet set to the music of Nine Inch Nails. After the final performance, while being grilled by my professors, I realized that, with no intention of doing so, I’d created a misogynistic piece of art. (For those of you unfamiliar with Shakespeare, there are two female roles in Hamlet: Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, and Ophelia, his girlfriend. Neither of them fare terribly well in Shakespeare’s script). In my desire to keep the play’s story intact and get inside Hamlet’s head, I had consigned Getrude and Ophelia to their tropey fates and validated the tired Madonna/whore complex that Hamlet uses to reduce them to caricatures. This would have been understandable if I were staging a more traditional Hamlet. But somehow, even though I was bringing in projections and smoke machines and rewriting the entire script and replacing huge chunks of it with sordid industrial rock numbers, there was some part of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that was sacred to me, that I couldn’t bring myself to reshape or discard: the fundamental arc of its story. I was blind to two things at the time:

That story uses the death of women as plot points to amplify the desires of men to kill each other, and if I was comitted 100% to telling that precise story, I could not escape that crappy trope, and

If rearranging, recontextualizing, or completely destroying the plot of Shakespeare’s masterwork was going to offend anyone, I was probably going to lose those people right around my version of Act I Scene 2, where Claudius lip-synchs “Big Man With A Gun” accompanied by lasers and lots of gyrating pelvises. No one who remained would be upset if I gave the women more agency and depth.

So, yeah, that’s how I put about two years of mental energy and weeks and weeks of blood, sweat, and tears into a piece of art that betrayed my principles. All of which is to say, let’s talk about intent of the artist vs. message of the work.

Let’s say you’re writing a story about a hero, someone who is measured beyond ordinary metrics, someone who does good things for good reasons. Let’s say that your hero makes a hard consequentialist choice that impacts people other than themself–they do something that seems harmful, but they do it in order to prevent something even worse from happening (one of these days, I will make it through an entire BLP article without mentioning consequentialism, just you wait). Let’s say, instead of condemning their actions, the world around your hero praises their action, understands the sacrifice that needed to be made in order to avert greater catastrophe. Got that set of hypotheticals in mind?

Now, here’s the question: by presenting this story in this way, with these variables, have you written something that advocates an authoritarian outlook? Does your work, through your hero, excuse the actions of those in positions of power who “sacrifice” the lives, livelihood, property, or holdings of other people, who may never have intended to put themselves in harm’s way?

Let’s modify this scenario: what if your hero makes this hard consequentialist choice based on information that no one else knows? If the rest of the world still forgives them, are you as the author tacitly advocating for the ability of a privileged few to throw folks who don’t know better under the bus in pursuit of progress or salvation? What if your hero suffers as part of this choice, but they are still forgiven? What if they are not forgiven?

I could spin hypotheticals all day long, but it might help to boil this argument down to what I see as the root issue: are there narrative avenues that are blocked to you if you’re creating work with a political conscience?

I’m not talking about subjectives here: we’ve already established that the values you have as a creator don’t always translate to the art itself. When I say “narrative avenues”, I’m talking about the tropes of narrative structure, the basic building blocks of character, location, and event, the most clinical elements of storytelling. Can you structure a story such that it conveys regressive social ideas even if none of your own original creative concepts are applied?

If so, then if we are to do good by making art, it is not enough to simply make art. If our values are to be enshrined in our art, we must lay down some, perhaps many, of our tools, and pick up new ones, or underutilized ones, and tell stories that are radical on a structural level. This is the ethos that drives punk, dada, DIY, and every other reactionary art movement, and it’s supposed to be scary. I’m personally scared. I don’t want to abandon any of my tools; they’ve all proven their utility to me countless times. But when I look back at my old work, I’m filled with a sense of disconnection, of alienation. I don’t believe my old work represents me. In most cases, I don’t even believe it represented me as I was when I created it. It was art for art’s sake–because I used to believe that art for its own sake was a pure good. But I’m sick of feeling like my work is hollow. I need to make work that feels like it matters, work that I feel invested in. I hope you do too.

]]>Scriv’s Favorite Albums of 2018: Beyond Creation, Algorythmhttp://bloodletterpress.com/scrivs-favorite-albums-of-2018-beyond-creation-algorythm
Tue, 02 Oct 2018 14:04:49 +0000http://bloodletterpress.com/?p=1130Continue reading Scriv’s Favorite Albums of 2018: Beyond Creation, Algorythm→]]>Since The Faceless started falling apart and Meshuggah had a brand-new genre label foisted upon them, Beyond Creation have been my go-to band for technical death metal. The Montréalais quartet don’t sound like every other tech death band, and honestly, given how samey tech death tends to be, that’s enough to get me interested. But Beyond Creation went beyond getting me interested and got me well and properly hooked.

The not-so-secret sauce, of course, is that six-string fretless bass (god, that sweet, sweet six-string fretless bass), but another thing that distinguishes them above other weedily-weedily bands is their grasp of melody, in both the riffs and the solos. On their third album, Beyond Creation take this aspect of their sound and develop it, with very pleasing results. It’s like they’ve been chipping away with their egg teeth at the rigid outer structure of tech death for their first two albums, and Algorythm is them finally peeking through, just beginning to transcend their niche. As such, it occasionally makes a choice that feels a little clumsy, but it’s a precious kind of clumsy, and you can’t fault the intricate, precise musicianship Beyond Creation have been honing since 2010. Overall the album’s a great time.

The first track, “Disenthrall”, is a bombastic horn-and-string intro, a proclamation that Beyond Creation are switching things up. I’ve gotta be honest, I’m not the biggest fan of bombastic horn-and-string intros on metal albums. If I put on a metal album (even a goofy power metal album, but especially a death metal album), I want to hear metal right out of the gate–I’d really rather not listen to an E.S. Posthumus B-side first. In this case, the catch is that Beyond Creation don’t abandon the classical palette after the first two minutes, nor do they get bogged down in it. Instead, they use it to inform and expand their sound throughout Algorythm, particularly on the last two tracks, “Binomial Structures” and “The Afterlife”, which are some of the best music they’ve ever written. The strings, accompanied by band mastermind and vocalist/guitarist Simon Girard on piano, also feature on the interlude “À Travers Le Temps Et L’Oubli”, which is followed up, in a brilliant juxtaposition, by the slam-riddled “In Adversity”.

Outside of horns and strings, the other typical avenue by which tech death acquires melody is jazz, and there’s some jazzy bits interspersed (particularly at the beginning of “Surface’s Echoes”), but, probably by taking careful measure of the scene around them and exercising the same delicate touch they used with the strings, Beyond Creation deftly avoid the ways in which jazzy bits can cheapen metal.

Past those gimmicks, all that’s left is good songwriting and stellar solo-crafting. New bassist Hugo Doyon-Karout trades solos with the band’s guitarists and brings all the sinuous flash of his unusual instrument to the fray, doing his predecessor and the band justice. Simon Girard has quietly retired the pig squeal from his vocal repertoire, and his two-tone screams continue to serve admirably. We even see something new from his voice on the last two minutes of “The Inversion”, wherein the flames are dialed down and we luxuriate in some smoky whispers and clean guitar.

My one complaint here is that “The Aferlife” ends so abruptly, and on such an unresolved chord, such a musical cliffhanger. Dang it all, Beyond Creation, I remain hooked.

Welcome back to O!susume RadioBeat with our 3rd broadcast, after a bit of a hiatus! You’ll be happy to hear that a small-ish part of this haitus was spent perusing the rental aisles of Tsutaya and GEOS in Saitama, Japan, and Nagi (that’s me) has returned with a whole new haul of recommendations for y’all.

Years Active: 2017 – Present

Core Members: n-buna (guitar/composer), Suis (vocals)

Point of Origin: Gifu Prefecture

Broadcast 3 is dedicated to Yorushika, a band that snuck up on me like a ragamuffin and has yet to release me from its colorful folds that twist around my eardrums. Having formed just last year in 2017, it’s still hard to say if Yorushika is a permanent band or just a temporary project. n-buna (guitar/composition) and suis (vocals) are the two featured members, with three others supporting them across the two mini albums released so far. (Mitsuru Shimotsuru on guitar, KITANITATSUYA on bass, and Masack on drums).

To understand the band’s origins, it’s best to start with founding member n-buna. Identifying as a male hailing from the Gifu prefecture of Japan, he’s been active since 2012 as a producer of vocaloid songs under the artist name VocaloP. He began working on electronic music in his 2nd year of jr. high school, with his purchase of an electric guitar and some music composition software. In 2013, his songs were charting at #1 in the vocaloid category on Japan’s premier video-sharing site Nico Nico Douga.

There isn’t much information on the web about where n-buna met suis and the other members of the band, or what inspired them to start playing together. Their debut moment was likely their first live performance at Shinjuku BLAZE, in conjunction with the release of their first mini-album, 夏草が邪魔をする (natsukusa ga jama suru: Summer Grass Gets In the Way). Yorushika has found the spotlight again recently with their second mini-album 負け犬にアンコールはいらない (makeinu ni ankōru wa iranai:Losing Dogs Don’t Need an Encore) in May 2018, taking #5 on the Oricon Charts that month, a seriously impressive feat for such a newcomer.

[It is telling how much copy-pasting goes on between websites when you see all the top search results on Google mis-translate アンコール (encore) as アルコール (alcohol), lol. To be fair losing dogs probably don’t need that either.]

With a mini-album of 7 or 8 songs, you might suspect a band of loading a bunch of afterthought “b-sides” behind one or two songs that push the sales. I personally found every single track on both mini-albums worth paying good money for; the fast-paced bangers are bookended by beautiful and lulling instrumental tracks that could underscore the most tear-jerking or heartwarming scenes of a high-production anime. n-buna’s technical skill and range as a composer is expertly showcased here, and suis’s vocals splash across his clean, crisp notes that fall like a microburst of summer rain onto thirsty pavement.

Evocative, in lyric and melody, is the name of Yorushika’s game. n-buna takes inspiration from his home prefecture of Gifu when writing many of the songs, incorporating nostalgic images of “dried-out” August clouds, long waits at sun-bleached bus-stops, and bittersweet young love that, like the old days of summer vacation, always seems to end too soon. According to an interview, even the band’s name was taken from an evocative passage in 雲と幽霊 (kumo to yūrei: Clouds and Ghosts), the final song on their first mini-album: “I could only sleep at night” (yoru= night, shika= only).

Yorushika has established an impressive presence on Youtube as well. They’ve gotten excellent talent in to direct their music videos, and all of them are a treat to watch as the visual styles range from manga-in-motion to composite-reality-fiction. First here’s いって。(itte:Say It.), their most popular upload at 10M views as of July 2018. The video is directed by Otori; if you want more of their style, you should also check out “Hitchcock” to see their charming little heroine grapple with an equally-charming inner demon representing their crushing depression. I decided to omit it from this feature cuz I have other personal favorites I want to spend time on.

“Fireworks Beneath My Shoes” (kutsu no hanabi: 靴の花火) is a warm summer wind following your walk back home, an excellent track to play on a whispery volume as the sun gives up the sky. I’m not sure if there was an intentional collaboration, but it’s striking that this video’s director (Second Origami) instills emotional dysphoria by erasing the character’s face. As you’ll see below, this also happens in the music video for “Just a Sunny Day For You”; I wonder if it was stylistic input by n-buna. Either way, it does a good job of invoking the ephemeral feeling of a photograph whose subjects’ identities have been lost to sun-bleach and the Lethe of time.

Finally, my favorite. “Just a Sunny Day For You” (tada kimi ni hare: ただ君に晴れ) is the epitome of all the bittersweet youthful feelings that n-buna strives for in his lyrics and melodic style, and suis knows how to punctuate her singing to perfectly complement the complexities of his drum, bass and guitar tracks. This video manages to make you long for the time back when you were a Japanese high-school student, of summer loves found and lost, of the conflicting desire for and resistance against your nearing adulthood… Of course, I was never actually a woebegone Japanese schoolkid, but if a song can make you feel those feels, that’s impressive in my book.

]]>Going Around: Recent Readshttp://bloodletterpress.com/going-around-recent-reads
Thu, 24 May 2018 03:24:58 +0000http://bloodletterpress.com/?p=1091Continue reading Going Around: Recent Reads→]]>Okay, so, we’re really preaching to the choir on this one; if you’re a regular here, you’re probably something of a bookworm, or have been one in the past. That said, books are more underrated than ever nowadays as a substantial form of entertainment. Herein are the literary weights we at BLP have been using to flex our imagination muscles.

Miki: Most Recently, I finished vol. 7 of Akiko Higashimura’s Princess Jellyfish. I really can’t recommend this series enough. In the same vein as Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss or Nana, Higashimura’s Princess Jellyfish delivers on fronts of high fashion, and heart breaking drama, as well as finding love, and discovering of what it means to be a creative young femme in our modern world.

I also had the pleasure of falling in love with Becky Abertalli’s Simon vs the Homo Sapien’s Agenda this spring. I sat down with the book one Sunday evening, and simply devoured it over the course of 6 hours. I laughed, I cried, and I immediately went to see the film. This is the kind of book I wish I had available to me as a teenager: a young, queer romance that doesn’t damn it’s titular character from the start, yet still deals with the real anxiety and emotional turbulence that comes with being a queer young adult in a hetero-normative space.

Honorable mention: Tyson Hesse’s Diesel: Ignition. I picked this up after spotting it in my favorite local comic shop during Free Comic Book Day earlier this month. As a fan of Hesse’s stylish visuals and Diesel‘s steampunk aesthetic, I cannot wait to pick up where I left off with this series in 2016.

Scriv: I’ve been reading stuff on the short side lately. I finished Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation this morning after buying it on impulse earlier this week and reading it in the twin hazes of early mornings and late nights. I’m not sure reading while groggy was a smart choice, or led to me appreciating the book more than I would have, but I’m eager to reread it–it’s short, so it should be easy. My only exposure to VanderMeer’s prior work was Wonderbook, a fabulous little treasure trove of ideas for any aspiring creator, and something I really ought to pick up a copy of soon. Annihilation is just as anxious and haunted as Wonderbook is jubilant and free. In a reversal of the relationship between observer and observed in the plot, Annihilation‘s lush, intricate landscapes are a lens through which the reader examines the psyche and voice of its protagonist, a biologist whose social alienation colors her every interaction and even renders her own testimony unreliable. VanderMeer’s writing, at times, reminded me of the things I don’t like about my own writing, but I have a feeling that those difficulties are exactly the sort of thing he’s going for. I’ll have to read it again to form a concrete opinion before I consider seeing the recent film adaptation, which, from the previews, looks to have added a lot in the way of uneccesary Hollywood glitz and done away with a key plot element.

Just prior to that, I finished a collection called Troll’s Eye View, wherein Neil Gaiman, Garth Nix, Holly Black, Jane Yolen, and others come together to tell some fairy tale stories from the perspectives of their villains. If you read like I do, you could probably finish it in an afternoon. It’s a delight.

Other than those, I’ve recently picked up, but not read, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which I’ve heard is defiantly queer, and Le Guin is a grandmaster of the form, so that’s exciting. I also replaced my copy of the first trade of The Black Monday Murders. Every time I introduce this newest Jonathan Hickman enterprise, I’m tempted to boil it down to its bare essentials, because they’re not particularly exciting: it’s a graphic novel about economics, largely told by people in suits, who are usually sitting down. (Sounds like the kind of TV show my parents like.) But get this: it also makes the concept of demon-worshippers scary again. Not just scary–genuinely chilling, the kind of crawling chills you get from the best prose horror, the kind that holds the restraint of tremolo-violin dread in one hand and the excess of sopping gore in the other.

Snacko: A few weeks ago I finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a sort of memoir that takes the form of a letter to Coates’ son on the night Michael Brown’s killer is acquitted. Coates’ tells the story of his childhood in Baltimore and of his attempts to unlearn the fear he learned growing up as an impoverished black youth even as the society around him enables senseless, random violence from both the institutions that surround him and from the lessons he and his community has learned to survive. Later chapters focus on Coates’ college education and his first time leaving the country, all under the specter of the threat of violence and with the hope of a better future for himself and for his family. It’s a short book (under 200 pages) but an extremely emotional one and I frequently found myself pausing after each paragraph to properly process it. A must read.

As for lighter fare, I’ve begun reading Eiichiro Oda’s enormous and wildly popular manga One Piece. Though I’m still in the early chapters (I’m on volume 10 of the current 88) I’m already liking its strange sense of humor and its conversational tone, with a majority of chapters beginning with a reader question and answer section. These often talk about the manga’s production and go into more detail about the absurd amount of detail Oda has put into this world, with major characters regularly making cameos dozens of chapters early. It does feel a tad formulaic, with each arc introducing its central conflict early and gradually building to a large scale fight sequence but its frequent use of flashbacks is a good way to develop the enormous cast and the art is expressive enough that all of these intense emotions feel vital and urgent. I’m not sure I’m up for 900 chapters of this, but I plan to stick with it for a while longer.

I’ve also been rereading Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 4: Diamond is Unbreakable by Hirohiko Araki, this time in color. As much as I love Jojo’s endless creativity and its offbeat sense of humor, I find Araki’s extremely detailed art a bit hard to follow in black and white and am having a much easier time following the action this time around. A sharp counterpoint to the globe-spanning Battle Tendency and Stardust Crusaders, Diamond is Unbreakable takes place entirely in one peaceful Japanese suburb and its characters feel a lot more three dimensional as a result. There is no world-ending threat this time, and most “battles” begin with the characters going about their daily lives and often end peacefully, adding to the manga’s ever-growing cache of background characters. The focus on community and the nostalgic, irreverent tone make the final threat, a serial killer so adept at blending in to his surroundings that he isn’t even properly introduced until the halfway point, a terrifying one, especially in a time when peaceful, everyday life is so often punctuated by news of more senseless killing.

]]>Going Around: Summer Jamshttp://bloodletterpress.com/going-around-summer-jams
Thu, 17 May 2018 13:16:32 +0000http://bloodletterpress.com/?p=1060Continue reading Going Around: Summer Jams→]]>Summer as a season of explosive energy is one of the oldest big moods. Summer blockbusters, summer vacation, summer camp, summer jams–it’s a time to cut loose, go on adventures, be maximalist. In particular, the summer jam is an exciting concept; it unifies us, but also acts as a statement of our individuality, for while we might all go nuts when the latest huge hit drops in July, we’ve also got our standby songs to sing along to at the top of our lungs while driving with the windows down. This week, our panel of contributors shares their summer jams on a playlist, and writes about their picks.

Miki: Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the summer jam of 2018 is Janelle Monae’s “Make Me Feel”, hot off of her newest album, Dirty Computer. Fresh, funky and flat-out celebratory, this is the jam critical to any day at the beach, wild night out, or summer road trip.

Looking for something a little less obvious? Give Saint Motel a try. Though their last album dropped in 2016, I didn’t have the chance to dive into their music until earlier this year. With catchy songs about falling in love and living it up, it was really only a matter of time before I was singing along. My top track recommendations? “Cold, Cold Man”, “Puzzle Pieces”, and “Born Again”. Each track is from a different album or EP, proving that these guys know how to work that airy, indie-pop mood.

Honorable mention: “「ODD FUTURE」”, by UVERworld. Packing a nostalgic punch, the folks who brought us “D-techno-life” are back, performing the OP for the highly anticipated season three of Boku No Hero Academia— it’ll leave you feeling PLUS ULTRA!

Scriv: When it comes to summer music, nothing does it for me like loud, fuzzy, muscley rock n’ roll. Desert rock, grunge, sludge metal, power pop, the kind of music that makes you want to drive way too fast with the windows down. Mutoid Man are the epitome here: check out “Gnarciccist” or “Reptilian Soul” and tell me that listening experience doesn’t transform you bodily into a red convertible (or the engine powering it–my god! the sweet heat of Steve Brodsky’s voice!, anyway, good luck being a car now).

If your summer road trip is a more protracted affair, I might suggest Kyuss‘s Welcome To Sky Valley, an oldie-but-goodie album jam-packed with desert rock groove, with just enough desolation interwoven to conjure up those empty stretches of road. “Demon Cleaner” is probably the best song about brushing your teeth ever written.

But let’s say you need something nastier, something full of sweat and grime, something downright ugly? Look no further than Burning Love‘s Rotten Thing To Say, a piece of work that makes Mutoid Man sound like The Beach Boys. Rotten Thing To Say is jam-packed with furious rippers, conjuring images of 100-degree basement shows and the roaring declarations one might make before a beachside bonfire at midnight. I really, really want these guys to make another album.

On the poppier side of things, The Pillows are my favorite band to share with dogs, while running down trails or tossing frisbees. Like dogs, The Pillows are full of playful verve and bring words like “romp” or “ruckus” to mind, but when they slow down and get mellow, they serve as a beautiful reminder of how good things can be simple and earnest and free sometimes.

Not all summer jams are feel-good thumpers, of course. If summer makes you feel weird, makes you feel alienated and nostalgic and trapped, consider some warm, melancholy electronica. Boards of Canada‘s Geogaddi is a masterful example of the kind of art that speaks to That Weird Feeling, whatever it might be. Its vintage synths and samples dance a beautiful, intricate dance around topics of belonging and where/how we take comfort in our surroundings, dredging up the summers of our youth and honoring them in incredible shades of color and sound, even as BoC throws those same summers into stark relief against what we wished could have happened, who we wish we could have been. Alec Lambert’s original soundtrack for We Know The Devil is also a vital piece of weird-feelings summer synth music; just before synthwave came into vogue, Lambert drenched John Carpenter’s synth-driven horror film scores in the overwarm, sticky inertia of the dog days, then acid-washed them in his own harsh-noise sensibility. The result is a set of songs that live in the humid territory between painfully beautiful and beautifully painful.

Goodness, so many more to talk about (AWOLNation, Maserati, Alestorm, The Dreadnoughts, Quest For Fire, Clutch, Muse, even Acid Bath), but in the interest of anyone else having anything left to write about, I’ll cut this short. Go forth and jam, for summer is fleeting and there are so many good times to be had!

Feryx: To be completely honestly, for years my standby summer jams have been Gorillaz and the soundtracks for the Jet Set Radio series. Together those two sources contain a good variety of genres and tones centered around an upbeat, funky core that is perfect for cruising with the windows down.

I’ve realized recently that I never gave Plastic Beach a fair shake back in the day, but it’s just full of warm vibes going on. On Melancholy Hill seems to rightly be one of the more popular of their songs overall, and Some Kind of Nature has really grown on me. In addition, I recently discovered a 2007 album called The Good, the Bad & the Queen, which was a Damon Albarn side project. It falls much more on the Blur-y Britpop side of things, but slots in well with everything else here. And I don’t think I need to tell you how great Gorillaz and Demon Days are.

Really though, nothing says summer to me like Jet Set Radio. The Dreamcast game and its Xbox sequel, Jet Set Radio Future, are about gangs of roller skatin’, graffiti taggin’, mischief makin’ teens battling with each other and The Man in the streets of Tokyo. If had done anything nearly as cool in my youth, this is how I would imagine it looking and sounding. Spotify lack the guest tracks for these soundtracks (which include Jurassic 5, some popular Tokyo indie bands from the era, and Beastie Boys side project The Latch Brothers), Hideki Nagenuma’s original compositions are an absolute blast all on their own. There’s a sense of fun and irreverence to sample-heavy tracks like Let Mom Sleep and Everybody Jump around.

Also since I’ll probably never find another chance to bring it up, check out this amazing JSR/Beastie Boys remix album, Jet Ill Radio.